Browse better: How to make your internet connection faster and more reliable

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The internet is a vital part of our lives. Just like your car, body, and robot underlings, your internet connection can be fine-tuned and made to work more efficiently. With just a little bit of effort, your surfing experience can be noticeably improved.

DNS

The quickest and easiest way to improve your internet surfing is to change your Domain Name System (DNS) service to OpenDNS. Not only are you very likely to see faster DNS resolution than your ISP’s DNS service, but it comes with a whole host of features. Anti-phishing, usage reports, and parental controls are built right in, and it’s as simple as changing a few numbers in your router or computer’s settings.

If there is a specific server or two that is always slowing down your page loads, you can simply keep your computer from reaching them by editing your hosts file. Hosts is a simple text file that can override your DNS service’s resolution to specific IP addresses. If you’re tired of an ad server or third-party service like Twitter wasting your resources, just set their domains to hit your localhost (127.0.0.1). Now when your favorite website tries to load that Twitter iframe, it will appear as if that server is offline.

If you’re running OS X, there is a very neat preference pane called Hosts that allows you to change your hosts file within System Preferences. Everyone else just needs to find the file, and customize it in your text editor of choice.

Traffic shaping

On heavy-traffic networks, sometimes the best you can do is triage. Many routers, especially those designed for businesses, have Quality of Service (QoS) settings. This allows specific types of traffic to have priority over others. For example, if your peers are flooding the router with BitTorrent traffic, you can configure the router to prioritize web traffic so you’ll be less inconvenienced. This is also extremely important if you’re planning on using VoIP. You don’t want that HD video downloading on iTunes to take priority over your important business call, so QoS will certainly come in handy.

Speeding up DSL

If you’re a DSL user, you might have heard about interleaving and FastPath. Interleaving is an error correction mechanism that makes sure you get all of your packets in an uncorrupted form. If your connection is bad, it can make a big difference when left on. However, people with good DSL connections might want to consider asking their ISP to turn this setting off, thus enabling FastPath. For example, you might want it off if you’re a big gamer because it can lower your ping time, and it’s not vitally important that every packet is received properly. The pros and cons vary heavily depending on your situation, so don’t assume turning it off will make your connection better.

DSL users may also have the option of changing their profile to more aggressive settings. If you are close to the local telephone exchange, there is less line noise, and thus higher connection speeds are possible if your ISP and router are correctly configured. To change your line profile you will generally need to contact your ISP (and you may need to speak to an engineer, rather than a customer service rep).

Compression

Not all of us can have FiOS or Xfinity. Some people are stuck with slow DSL, satellite, or even dial-up internet connections. For these poor souls, there is a way to dramatically decrease your load times: compression. While there are a few services that offer this, the simplest way to get dynamic image compression is with Opera Turbo. Install Opera, turn on the Turbo feature, and it will automatically detect when you’re on a slow internet connection. It will then start passing every website you visit through their servers, and squashing the elements on the page. The quality of the images will suffer, but at least your bad connection will be usable.

Extend your wireless network

If your internet connection is fine, but you lose WiFi connection in certain parts of your house, this can be fixed too. What you need is a wireless bridge. Using the Wireless Distribution System (WDS), you can use a second wireless router to extend your WiFi range. When you’re shopping for a bridge device, look for terms like “Wireless Bridge” or “WDS” in the product description. If you have a router laying around, and the official firmware doesn’t support what you want, you can consider a third party firmware to make your life easier. Something like the Tomato firmware can make locked-down consumer routers easier to configure and use for just such purposes.

Bear in mind that simply plugging your computer into a physical, wired connection can also significantly reduce latency and increase throughput.

If your surfing is slow, these tweaks and services can make a big difference. However, these won’t solve every problem under the sun. Try these out, and hopefully it will cure what ails you. If not, your best bet will be calling your ISP, and asking for help. Even the nerdiest among us can’t get around that sometimes, so don’t feel bad.

Tagged In

Using OpenDNS is actually a bad idea. It breaks most of the anycast routing on the internet. e.g. if you lookup youtube.com for example, your ISPs DNS server will give you a youtube server that’s located close to you. If you use OpenDNS, it will return a youtube server that’s close to the OpenDNS server you queried. This doesn’t just affect Youtube. It affect basically everything that you use to download/stream data from. iTunes, Hulu, Pandora etc. pp – you name it. And the very same problem exists with all of the global DNS providers (it doesn’t make a difference whether you use OpenDNS or Google’s DNS service, for example).

It’s a myth that your local ISP’s DNS server is slower than the rest. If you really lookup a site that no one else has ever looked up before you (on that DNS server) it might take a couple of miliseconds longer than usual, but the DNS response is of much higher quality.

marvin nubwaxer

i tried it. terrible idea and besides this techo geek snob seems to be using a mac.

GatzLoc

I have it as my backup dns just use namebench to find the closest/fastest. For me, it was my ISP (Distributel) and I just use opendns as a backup since it was reasonably fast. I’ve felt a noticable increase in internet responsiveness since I switched to my ISP’s DNS from my router’s.

Namebench would quantify it as an avg increase of 30-40% but again you agree with that.

cryptochrome

It’s not about speedy responsivness. It’s all about the results. If you’re using OpenDNS you might end up streaming youtube from south-africa. Read my comment above.

http://www.mrseb.co.uk/ Sebastian Anthony

I’ve been using Google’s DNS servers, which feel a little bit faster than my ISP’s.

A note to add about extending your wireless network is to put your main router near vents. I tried this in my own home and I get a better signal with the router 30+ feet away but near vents than I did even a room or two away through walls.

It’s in the basement now instead of the main floor but most of the main floor and backyard get a better signal.

http://www.mrseb.co.uk/ Sebastian Anthony

Hehe, cool tip :)

preilly2

I like to use Steve Gibson’s DNS Benchmark, a freeware utility that compares the speed and reliability of your current Domain Name Server to a variety of other publicly available servers. It gives a detailed report and makes sensible recommendations. Worth a try IMO and it found me a couple of much faster servers than my ISP’s.

http://twitter.com/crystal95080744 crystal

hey

http://twitter.com/crystal95080744 crystal

<3

Johhny Marshal

Internet speed basically depends upon the type of internet connection, but sometimes depending the factors are different. It is suggested that if you encounter any similar problem, take expert help to resolve it. Tech experts at http://www.supportmart.net are 24/7/365 available for customer support.

David Becker

An unreliable connection can be a huge pain because pinning down the cause is so difficult. If you think your ISP is the problem, the first step is to document the outages – otherwise their answer is always “It’s working fine now!”: Use a utility like Net Uptime Monitor to log drop outs and outages. Show that log to your ISP to get some real action!

http://www.proservicesks.com Frank Woodman Jr

So many things to think about and monitor but having played with some of these things they can make a very big difference sometimes. Sadly one never knows about any of them until you try them out. Of the lot the one most certain to make a difference is changing your Domain Name System(DNS) service to OpenDNS is the most certain. Just be sure you study the instructions for doing this and be sure you understand how to change back if you have any problems. Computers can always surprise us and decide they don’t like something we’ve done.

My computer used to also be extremely slow and I didn’t know what to do. I then found http://yourpcoptimizers.com and it helped me get my computer running fast again!!!

sanjay252

Besides some factors like processor computing speed, internet speed depends upon the Bandwidth provided by Internet Service Providers, but it is always a good practice to take advice form technical experts from sites like http://www.supportonlinecomputer.com

Muthu

can anyone tell me, i am work in corporate company, i faced following problems, when i connect my system my LAN cable.. my connection is very slow ( Like : If i download any videos, and software just download 50kbps, but same cable connect other non-domain system my connection is good and download speed is ( 100kbps to 200kbps ) increasing ) this is my problem, can you give the needful solution. —- MY ISP connection Bandwidth is 2Mbps. and the traffic out is 108.40kbps. traffic in 1.29mbps.